They finally did it, from the same people that brought us the quite successful demake of Bloodborne we get that same universe as a kart racer.

It may not share the title or character and location names, but we know what this is and it works perfectly fine circling that potential legal issue.
Everything you can imagine from the PS4 classic is here, the characters, the enemies, the weapons, the locations and each of these are fantastically and hilariously realised in a very different genre with a PSX aesthetic that goes hard, although perhaps too much so.

The music for me is stellar, an intersection of a venn diagram that shows the games two main influences in Mario Kart and Bloodborne.
Weapon implementation is great and I was especially impressed with the unique mechanic of killing the jobber enemies to increase your maximum speed in much the way coins do for MK.

The karts themselves are hilarious, there are steam-powered bikes and karts, but also General Grievous-like clock wheels and even the potential to run on foot.
Control wise you’re doing as you’d expect from Mario and friends’ racing times, power sliding to build boosts, little stunts of off jumps to also gain speed and when you can, simply using boost pads.
The feeling however is not to the same quality as Mario Kart, perhaps unfair to expect this. When things are going well it feels close to it, but when things are going wrong - my word, is it much jankier!

I really appreciate that the developers decided to go for more than just straight races, but here things feel even worse, aimlessly sliding around, the AI really not being up to much and more than once in my short time with it I powerslid out-of-bounds and died. Not great.

Graphically I am a fan of the demake look and most item pick-ups and signs are quite clear. The extremely short horizon, the amount of darkness however… not a fan.
It makes falling off tracks, much more unfair feeling, and it felt like I was mostly staring at the map when doing battle arenas.

Nightmare Kart has all the ideas, there is a campaign which was a pleasant surprise but like the rest of the package I just do feel the execution is there.
It’s pay-what-you-like and even with the issues I had, was more fun at the time than many other IP labelled Mario Kart clones I’ve played. A worthwhile experience but not one I can see myself ever returning to.

Easily one of the best expansions in gaming ever. Whether you love what the Witcher did or not for gaming, the technicality of what a great expansion should be is achieved perfectly by Blood and Wine. I can safely bargain that this expansion completely dethrones Shivering Isles as the DLC that best builds on a game both as a separate experience and as an addition to the game's lore and characters.

What i love the most is that the whole personality of the game changes when entering the world of Blood and Wine. The color pallette changes, the characters are different (french now lol) and even the writing becomes even a bit more fantastical (there are vampires even gasp!)

I wish full games nowadays could have such soul and polish as this DLC has.

I knew this was a classic, going in, but what I hadn't anticipated was just how elemental and minimalistic it would be. It was a pleasant surprise and welcome subversion to discover a game that I had known only to be an innovative open world adventure was in fact set in a barren desert, melancholic from its opening cinematic, and centred around a gameplay loop so simplistic that the weight of its repetitions acquire a purposefully suffocating heft, even as the colossi designs and environmental attention required to topple them remain for the most part fresh throughout the experience.

Shadow of the Colossus is a deeply lonely game. Though accompanied by a reliable steed, the experience of wandering through this world only to devastate it makes you feel more and more like a harbinger of death itself, barely receptive to the emotions and realities of the creatures you kill, just charging forward as a naive emissary, directed by a force you never dare to question.

The gameplay itself is slightly clunky; handling your horse takes some time to master, clambering up surfaces can occasionally feel glitchy if you are being thrown around, and there is a sense that the environment itself has a general antipathy towards you - some surfaces that look like they should be climbable simply aren't, and there is no fast-travel system. All of these may read as flaws but it is to the game's credit that its atmosphere, narrative, and general emotional tone render them as assets rather than liabilities. These things should not be easy. There should be no shortcuts. The world should resist you, because there is still life in it, and you are, ultimately, a threat.

This does mean that sometimes the colossi can feel a little tedious. It is, if not a necessary cost, then perhaps an understandable one, as a product of the game's philosophy. Sometimes you have to wait, sometimes the puzzles can be obtuse, and sometimes you will just feel stupid. Sometimes a jump will feel needlessly finnicky, or a gimmick poorly communicated. But only rarely did that actually take me out of the experience, and ultimately those instances were forgivable for the grandeur and scale on which the game operates, the smallness that you feel, the conflict at the heart of your purpose.

"Shadow of the Colossus is one of the great game experiences everyone should have" is the wisdom I've seen frequently extolled, and for all of my assumptions that this would reflect on innovative gameplay, world building, and narrative impact, ultimately the greatest asset of my experience was the isolation at the core of its protagonist, Wander's, world. For as noble and altruistic his motivations - the desire to save an anonymous companion - the world is resistant, and antagonistic, and content without you. And it is only in accepting that, in embracing that, that you can fully commune with it, and what seems like a chaos coalesces into a harmony. The light that draws you to a single point is not a target, it's a call. It's too late for Wander, but it's not too late for us.

[Some slight bias as I was gifted the expansion having worked on the VO record.]

As far as comebacks and resurgences go, CDPR nailed it with the Phantom Liberty Expansion. Putting aside all of the updates and finishing touches they have made to the base game, Phamtom Liberty kicks it all into overdrive with even more gameplay features and a true cyberpunk espionage story for the ages.

The gameplay additions truly take CP2077 into a proper RPG area with all of the different builds and ways to play as your V. I had a great time experimenting with different builds and put in heaps of time trying to perfect each one.

The story is truly a beautifully written masterpiece and one which I know I will go back to again and again to try out different endings and different paths. CDPR pulled out the big guns to write something truly memorable, and at such a high-quality bar, that I look forward to other games within the genre stepping up to their mark. The depth at which characters are written is amazing, and the world which was created in the form of Dogtown was incredible.

The performances which came out of the leading cast, support cast, and NPCs were all absolutely top tier and they are performances which will stick with me forever. CDPR did not hold back in casting huge talent and gave them the content to back up their decisions. Idris Elba gave a heavy and conflicted performance as Reed, and Minji Chang as Songbird is a beautiful and tragic exploration of her character. Both V's were stellar as per usual, giving differing performances in ways which offered different experiences depending on who you played as, and both set the bar so high when it comes to player characters. I could go on and on about how good the performances are from everyone, all the way down to NPCs with one line, but I will be here all day.

CP2077 & Phantom Liberty are must plays, you cannot miss these.

Hindsight is 20/20, and this truly is the beginning of the end.

Burning Crusade made the giant world of Azeroth much smaller, but still had a lot of that Classic "heart". Wrath made WoW even smaller, and eventually become a weekly raidlog simulator.

Wrath had, in my opinion, peak class design in all of Warcraft's history--and I love the lore and story of Arthas, like many Warcraft fans--but the game itself really began to suffer. When it released, it was a 10/10 in my heart; but as time marched on and end game became the only point to logging in for many, my alts slowly died in the old world, and Azeroth closed off forever from that point on.

Thanks to the retrospectives of Classic's releases, I now realize how much of what I loved in Vanilla was lost each time they "expanded" the game. I appreciate the opportunity to finally play Wrath (I began with Cataclysm in 2011), but I could never go back to this release cadence for MMOs.

If Classic+ disappoints or never releases, I'll at least have Turtle WoW, Era servers, and maybe some others like LOTRO. And if all else fails, sleep well sweet prince.

Yeah, yeah...I played this game three times. I guess I must like it, right?

Rin may be best girl but I think this is probably the better version of the game. It's very tightly constructed around the original premise and I think a lot moodier overall? I feel like sometimes the Golden version of Atlus games are too into celebrating themselves retrospectively and lose sight of delivering their original thesis; Rin feels a lot like Marie in Persona 4 Golden in that respect.

The Catherine True ending is the best one I think. And it makes the Rin endings later on in Full Body seem less weird, too.